A reporter and photographer spent several hours at IndyHall this past Wednesday and the product of their work hit newsstands this past sunday morning…we’ve got a bunch of printed copies of the biz section of Sunday’s Philadelphia Inquirer but if you’re not near a copy (or your newsstand doesnt carry it) you can read it here! If you do grab a copy, we’re on the front AND back page of the business section.

“It’s impossible to go through life with blinders on in New York City,” says Economopoulos. “You have to figure out how to live with millions of other people. That’s what coworking is about.”

when elliot winard transplanted himself to nyc, not only did he find a new city, but a new community of like minded folk. if you’ve been wondering what’s it like to cowork, read this great article by Kiera Butler in the New York Post.

While the article gives a good overview of the culture of independents working out of cafes that lead to coworking, he conspicuously makes no mention of the many efforts to create physical spaces and efforts cropping up to proactively support this lifestyle.

In fact, in a slideshow called Urban Nomads, the first slide specifically leads off with text that reads:

A new breed of worker is flourishing. With laptops in hand, these tech savvy workers shirk the confines of cubicles to roam San Francisco coffee houses. Instead of renting office space, they pay for coffee and scones. They call themselves Bedouin workers and say they are changing the nature of the workplace.

(emphasis mine)
While this might be anecdotally true of Kevin and Jonathan, it ignores the progress our community is making in setting up sustainable, community-driven productivity spaces. It also seems to suggest that this behavior is specific to San Francisco, when in reality, this trend of independent working is happening around the world in equal measure.

Judging by the attendance at the coworking meetup at BarCampAustin yesterday, I’d say that it’s important that the story told is one that acknowledges the work of an international community that is working to meet its own needs by creating, building and renting spaces for modern independent workers. It’s not so much that the cafe environment isn’t a good one for us (I’m writing this from Halcyon in Austin), it’s just that there’s more to the story than Dan is reporting on. And, as someone who’s visited Citizen Space and The Hat Factory, I hope that in a later article, he’ll address the work that we’ve begun to move even beyond the cafe environs to creating work spaces of our own design and desire.

Over the past few years, coworking facilities—both grassroots, co-op-like versions and for-profit models—have started popping up across the country and the world, from Seattle to Copenhagen. A CoWorking Wiki hosts pages for dozens of other cities with coworking initiatives in progress. And while the concept of shared office space is nothing new to entrepreneurs, an increasing number of them are signing on and finding that the community-building and networking benefits outweigh even the virtues of a shared fax machine.

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